A top exec says he has women do all the hiring at his company — here’s why that could be a problem

A recent
New Yorker profile of Yvon Chouinard, cofounder of Patagonia,
features a curious bit of information about the company's
staffing process.

As Chouinard told New Yorker reporter Nick Paumgarten:

"I'm terrible at hiring. I only trust women to hire people here.
In an interview I have no idea. They can bulls--- me, and I
believe them."

Whether women make better interviewers than men, and specifically
whether they're better at spotting job candidates who are lying,
is a surprisingly understudied topic.

One of the only psychologists who's addressed this question is
Nicolas Roulin, a professor at the University of Manitoba's Asper
School of Business. Roulin has conductedmultiplestudies that
suggest interviewers are notoriously poor judges of dishonesty,
regardless of their experience level, personality traits — or
gender.

Of all the experiments Roulin has conducted on interviewers'
ability to detect deception, just
one found a gender difference. In that
experiment, women were slightly more likely than
men to assume a candidate was lying when that person was in fact
telling the truth. At this point though, the reason for those
findings isn't clear.

In general, Roulin said in a phone interview, there's a common
misconception that women have more soft skills in interpersonal
situations.

Many people mistakenly believe that women get a "gut feeling when
it comes to assessing someone else's behaviors," he said, that
they have a "sixth sense." But there's little to no evidence to
support these beliefs.

Bottom line: Don't race to copy Chouinard's hiring strategy.

Interviewing is hard, especially the part where you have to
figure out if your smooth-talking job candidate is really as
great as he says he is. So invest in training programs for your
hiring managers or figure out who's already a skilled interviewer
— but don't rely on popular myths about who's good at what around
the office.